Academic questions 3: Fundraising costs

German universities look with envy at the rivers of alumni donations that flow into their US counterparts and do not flow with the same abundance here. (German corporate donors will pony up for specific projects that are useful to them, but that's another matter.)

Alumni groups of a sort--the "Friends and Supporters of University X"--have existed at many of the universities here for some time, but they are not big operations. Consider LMU in Munich, which has as good a claim as any institution to be the best university in Germany. It now has over 50,000 students and is a very internationally aware, go-ahead kind of place. it has an alumni organization that was founded more than ninety years ago and has all of 2,400 members. The alumni do come to networking events, I think, but they keep their hands firmly in their pockets. Professional development personnel are few and frustrated.

It’s not that people don’t give, here. Contrary to what you might suppose from reading some of the US press, Germans don’t expect the state to do everything. They donate, they volunteer, they found nonprofit organizations in droves. If you have to be picked up by an ambulance in the US, it probably belongs to either the fire department or a for-profit company. Here, if it doesn’t belong to the fire department it belongs to a charity supported by private donations. Donations and volunteer labor get the homeless into shelter on cold winter nights, stock and staff food pantries, maintain footpaths in the countryside and classes in Turkish classical music and I could not begin to tell you what else.

So it’s not that people don’t give; they just don’t give much to universities. The universities do not occupy the same cultural slot in Germany as in the UK and US. They don’t have the same emotional, imaginative resonance; and emotional resonance has something to do with where the money goes.

When Gerard Manley Hopkins was writing about Oxford,

            Towery city, and branchy between towers,

            Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, 
                 river-rounded …

who was writing great lyrical poetry about the University of Berlin?  You have to be kidding. 

On a less exalted note, universities do not have songs here. American university songs—alma maters, fight songs—seem as peculiar here as Japanese company songs do in the US. (One night when we had a young Berlin friend over for dinner, Archangel and I started in on “Far above Cayuga’s waters” by way of explaining the term “alma mater.” The young friend looked at us if we were absolutely barzoomy. Why?? she said.)

Similarly, I don’t think there is a German equivalent to the Oxford scenes in Brideshead Revisited, or C.P. Snow’s novels about university politics at Cambridge, or popular murder-at-Oxford books. The university in Germany is more like an ordinary workplace. Anglo-Americans don’t emote about the dreaming towers of the business district, and Germans don’t do it about the universities. Which tend not to have dreaming towers in any case, but miscellaneous rooms scattered inconspicuously around the middle of town. The only German university towers that come to mind are the one that was recently demolished in Frankfurt (big event, it had to be blown up), and the ugly tooth-like high-rise of the U of Leipzig, which the locals satirically call the “wisdom tooth.”

There is less emotional attachment to universities here because the university you went to is not particularly part of your identity here. It’s not evident to me that Göttingen people are different from Tübingen people in the way that Harvard people are different from Chicago people. In the US, the university is often a transforming experience: it’s an important contributor to making you who you are. Going to college means leaving home, socially or geographically or both, and learning to be a somewhat different person in a different world. It’s like the initiation rites in hunter-gatherer societies, in which adolescents are sent out into the bush or jungle to lose their childhood, learn the adult lore of the tribe, undergo possibly dangerous challenges, and come back as different, grown-up people. 
 
German universities do not have so much of this ritual resonance. In the US, if you go off to an elite university your high school friends may be a thousand miles away. It can't happen here, you can't be a thousand miles from home and still be in Germany. In the US, even if you go to State U an hour from home, it may be your first experience being this close to white people, or to black people, or your first experience in a town this big, or this small. The same is not likely to happen here: there's much more social continuity between Gymnasium (college-prep high school) and university. 

There's also more intellectual continuity here. It's possible in the US to get into a decent university even if you went to a high school that bans books or at least discourages reading, that believes the goal of education is docility and correct answers to multiple choice tests. And then the university is fabulously liberating. So you're grateful to it and later you give it money. The Gymnasia are not so likely to be intellectually dead, and so the universities get less love for being intellectually alive.
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So you can look at the cost of fundraising in the US as being the cost of operating the development office, which is relatively easy to estimate and to use in local decisions (for example, do we need another staffer to focus on bequests?). Or you can look at the cost of fundraising as including some of the costs of a culture in which fundraising will be highly successful--and then the costs are not easy to estimate and are largely out of the reach of local decisions.